Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Supermoon and the Small Print

The Supermoon Is New And Guaranteed 
To Fill Your Sky With Cleanliness 
Located Next To Godliness 
Insuring Your Material Well-Being 
Until There’s No Material Left To Be! 
That you never were material 
is immaterial to this company. 
That the body’s like a wireless receiver 
and you’re the wave it amplifies 
is covered somewhere in this small print. 
Not reading your intuition is confusion 
to be suffered when mistaking 
such an object as the subject. 
Identity theft begins at home.

The way will let you know you've lost the way.
The way will let you know you are the way.
What one is is self-explanatory
as one distinguishes the what one isn’t.
Freedom's just another word
for nothing isn't my imagination.
Don’t mistake the tenor of the way
for some vehicle on the road.
Commercials pointing to the supermoon
are neither super nor the moon.
Supply's unlimited although this offer
may be withdrawn at any moment.
You are the wellspring of creation;
drink yourself responsibly.



Sunday, August 10, 2014

Known Unknown

Whatever I am, 
I’m not distressed, 
non-existent, 
nor unintelligent. 
Some call this ground 
awareness, but that’s 
as much a metaphor 
as the moon; 
abstract nouns 
are still concrete. 
I am unborn, 
undying, not two— 
that open space 
without a view.



Saturday, August 9, 2014

How Many Years Can a Mountain Exist

The world is like ten thousand words 
and all of them are lies if you believe them.
What is an orange when it’s not orange?
What is a person when it isn’t taking something personally?
Thoughts are either like delightful companions
or they’re enemies convincing one is two
and present is the past wishing it’s the future.
Keep your similes like friends and metaphors much closer.
Religion is the truth turned inside-out.
The truth is using words to point at what I really am.
The question to be asked is who am I
when I’m not thinking of an answer.
Thinking that I know is always overblown.
The answer, my friend, is being the unknown.



Wednesday, August 6, 2014

on war

"I was against...on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hate to see our country be the first to use such a weapon." ~Dwight D. Eisenhower on Hiroshima bombing 8/6/1945

Hiroshima & Nagasaki weren't isolated events but a culmination of American policy to target civilian populations in mass terrorist bombings.

In the constant war that is ego, the target never changes: the other. Only the technologies increase the accuracy and numbers.

The fire of war is always smoldering and re-igniting: gaza and world war two and world war one and previous wars are not separate events.

Great wars are not separate from personal wars are not separate from inner psychological wars. The egoic state of consciousness is war.

The wise response to war is to see through the sides and not take yet another.

Saturday, August 2, 2014

The Undivided Pseutra

Where ‘this’ and ‘that’ cease to be opposites,
there lies the pivot of the Way
~Chaung Tzu (tr. Mair)

it’s not so much the world is an illusion
but how that illusion is relentlessly tricking one—

the illusion is division
but the trick convinces one
to put things back together
when of course they aren’t apart—

and by endlessly trying to put together
things which aren’t apart,
one loses focus on the truth:
one is that which is not apart—

the world appears to be
constantly tearing apart
but everyone is attempting to put it
back together in the best way they see fit—

the human illusion has
seven billion points of view—

you are this
and the other is that
but the other is this to itself
and you are that to it—

the mind divides;
this is the function of mind—

one takes a side;
this is identification with mind—

war!
this is one lost in mind—

war is fought in the home,
on the streets,
at work,
and maybe more importantly,
within oneself,
every single second of the day—

one takes sides;
this is identifying with mind—

one sees one side as god;
this is fundamentalism—

one may completely raze any opposing side;
this is evil—

an ego is like an edifice
built from all the sides one takes—

psychology tries to right the sides;
truth reveals the sides aren’t really there—

so absolute truth is unknown
and all one knows of absolute truth is being—

in other words,
is there an unknown?
yes, i am that.

Thursday, July 31, 2014

S6 — Calvin on an Island

Island people have a saying: “Nowhere is an island.” Visitors are puzzled when they hear this spoken. After all, they’ve spent much time and money just to reach this paradise in the middle of an ocean.

Calvin was such a one. He went without for fifty weeks just to have his two upon that isle. So when he breathlessly disembarked only to be greeted by an islander conveying this saying, he strongly begged to differ.

The islander just smiled and said, “It makes no difference,” and danced lightly off to greet another. A recent transplant to the island seeing Calvin’s being at variance stopped to offer a more comprehensive reception: “No matter how you slice it, there never is division.”

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

S5 — Isle of Eyes: A Myth of the Scientific

In the eye of a hurricane, there’s an eye of a needle. In the eye of a needle, there’s an eye of an eye. The island people call this eye a third eye and take their own eyes out whenever it goes seeing. For what it sees is visible to no one.

There was a visitor who called himself an optical magician, prescribing telescopes to those he diagnosed as near-sighted, and microscopes to those he saw as far-sighted. But the island folk, as far as he could see, were neither.

He plucked his own eyes out in a pique of speculation but it left him only sightless. The island people divined no notion why he’d make a scene like that. And so they led him in a starry-eyed procession to a long reflective beach and cast him out to sea.

Monday, July 28, 2014

S4 — Breaking Up Is Hard Nondoing Too

It was early in the process of discovery
I knew the two of us would lose each other.
Paradox is not unknown in love.
At first our paths continued, one upon the other,
but soon we found ourselves in the yellow wood.
It didn’t happen overnight and all our efforts
to maintain separating ways together met
with personal effects like alcohol on my behalf
and a drier kind of melancholy in yours.
You finally had the nerve to call it quits
but even that was met with one more year of trying.
It’s over now; surrendering to that which is
can really be a bitch. But that’s the price.

You said that day you liked the middle class
and I was always making light of it.
That’s forever been the case with me.
It’s just my form of self-assessment.
Even though I’m living now without
the greater luxuries I once afforded,
I’m not exactly third-world poor—
thank my daughter and her Major.
This is the present empire after all.
So I know these fears about security,
but I’ve seen you lately follow them
and then convince yourself you hadn’t.
That’s the way of people though, divided.

The path I’ve taken teaches seeing this,
to recognize such separation for what it is,
to know the false as false. That leaves pure being,
not being this or that. And being tells one all that is—
and That which absolutely isn’t takes one back.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Song-stream 3 — Incident on Sky Mountain

There’s a mountain lofty enough
it takes two days to make the peak.
It rises in the heart of a desert
where nomads pray to any passing mirage.
They’re satisfied to dine on scorpions
while downing barrel cactus juice.
They hallucinate of cubicles
floating in a glass of cabbages and ginger
looking at the rain streak the skylight
hoping they’ve secured the windows
in their newly-leased Honda Civics.
One of them flies out the door to check
but strikes the mountain there instead.
Soon she’s in a globe of berries.
The air is fragrant with exacting freshness.

She sees above the ripples of heat;
there’s not an office in her eye.
Half-way up she finds a halfway house.
It’s an edifice she’s yet to dream.
She’s genially greeted at the door
and welcomed with the latest reality
of living rooms and large flat screens
with twenty-four hour interruptions.
Exhausted with the climb, she wants to stay.
Twenty years later, she’s out to catch a breather
and meets a mad man coming down the mountain.
Maybe it’s a mad woman. He raves or she raves,
“You’ve stopped believing in a personal god,
but you’re still believing in the personal!”
and then turns to return to the sky.

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Song-stream 2 — Compassionist Manifesto

Mind apparently divides 
that nonduality 
and wonders why its world is one 
of separation, violence, want, and war.

Even when this unity appears
in shapes love takes—
like justice, hope, equality—
the mind will take control
with judgment and conviction
and an execution of its end
justifying any of its means.

And so it goes…

There’s no arguing
the utmost advocates of civil rights
within the infamous twentieth century:
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Nonviolence was their word,
but more importantly the sacrifice of ego
—this identity with mind—
to universal consciousness;
call it Krishna, call it Christ.

You know it when you feel it,
some holistic intuition
that division is completely inauthentic,
that existence is lovingly impersonal,
that love is unconditional
and the personal is conditioned by division
and that’s the way it is.

And even this spontaneous understanding
is usurped by mind
and formed into religion
and fashioned into dogma, rules, belief
and fought in endless wars where
holy ends are justified
by all apocalyptic means.

Stop! There is no end

there’s only means,
there’s always only here and now
and every action is reflection
of the clarity within.

Our only call is clear our self—
an empty sky
breezes through and does the rest.